CineLinkr #44: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Memoria is the kind of Tilda Swinton movie that almost nobody sees in a normal cinema, partly because it is about a woman trying to track down a sound only she can hear, and partly because the film moves at the speed of remembering something you cannot quite place. It is also a useful door into today's board, because every category here trades on a thing the films share at the surface, even when the films themselves have nothing in common underneath.

🟢 Easy: Starring Tilda Swinton

Movies: Michael Clayton · Only Lovers Left Alive · I Am Love · Memoria

Swinton is one of the few actors who can headline a Tony Gilroy legal thriller, a Jim Jarmusch vampire reverie, a Luca Guadagnino Italian melodrama, and an Apichatpong Weerasethakul ambient mystery without any of the four films feeling like they are slumming or stretching. Michael Clayton is the most conventional of the four, and even there she walks off with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar by playing corporate panic in the bathroom mirror.

Only Lovers Left Alive is the easiest hangout movie of the bunch, because Jarmusch lets her and Tom Hiddleston be centuries-old vampires who are mostly just exhausted by humans. I Am Love is the film where she does her famous learn-Italian-with-a-Russian-accent feat. Memoria is the one that closes the door on anything resembling a normal release pattern. The shared name on the poster is the only easy thing about the row.

🟡 Medium: Set in Tokyo

Movies: Tokyo Story · Enter the Void · Like Father, Like Son · The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

Tokyo Story is the obvious cornerstone, because Ozu's 1953 portrait of an aging couple visiting their distracted adult children is the film that most people mean when they say "Japanese cinema" without further detail. It is quiet, patient, and devastating in the last twenty minutes. Like Father, Like Son sits in roughly the same emotional register half a century later, with Hirokazu Koreeda using a baby swap at a Tokyo hospital as the cleanest possible way to ask what makes a parent.

Then the row gets weirder. Enter the Void is Gaspar Noé taking a Tokyo neon drug trip and turning it into a 161-minute first-person death dream. Tokyo Drift is the one where the Fast and Furious franchise relocated to Shibuya for a movie about high-school exchange-program drifters and accidentally produced one of the best entries in the series. The category is just the city. Everything else they do with it is wildly different.

🔵 Hard: Films that unfold in real time

Movies: High Noon · Cleo from 5 to 7 · Nick of Time · Silent House

High Noon is the one that locked the gimmick into the public imagination. Fred Zinnemann counts the marshal's wait down with clock inserts that line up with the actual runtime, so by the time the train arrives you have been waiting with him in close to literal terms. Cleo from 5 to 7 is the art-cinema version of the same idea. Agnès Varda follows a young singer through ninety minutes of a Paris afternoon while she waits for medical results, and the real-time grip turns ordinary errands into something almost unbearable.

Nick of Time is the studio thriller take, with Johnny Depp as a man given ninety minutes to assassinate the governor or lose his daughter. Silent House goes the opposite direction. It is a horror movie staged as one continuous take inside a single house, which is real time and real geography at once. Four films, four genres, one shared trick: the movie's clock is your clock.

🟣 Tricky: Title contains a body part

Movies: My Left Foot · Scarface · Body Heat · The Hand That Rocks the Cradle

This is the row where the connection is hiding in the marquee. Foot, face, body, hand. Read the titles out loud and the link becomes embarrassingly obvious, which is exactly why it tends to be the last group people solve. The films themselves have nothing in common: a biographical drama about Christy Brown, a Brian De Palma cocaine epic, a Lawrence Kasdan neo-noir, and a Curtis Hanson nanny-from-hell thriller.

My Left Foot is the only one of the four where the body part is also a plot-critical fact rather than a metaphor or a stray noun. Scarface borrowed its title from the 1932 Howard Hawks original about Al Capone. Body Heat's title was workshopped to sound deliberately pulpy, and that pulpiness is half the reason the film still plays so well. The trick of the category is just to stop looking for a theme and start looking at the words.

If you finished the movie board and want a second round, today's PixelLinkr puzzle is also live. Same format, very different shelves to pull from.